Shadhika

Help Shadhika raise $50,000 to protect gender equity post-COVID in India.

Pooja was barely surviving in a family torn apart by poverty, abuse, and alcoholism. Despite constant chaos and insecurity at home, Pooja found safe haven, empowerment, and a brighter future in Shadhika’s programs and its commitment to support a young woman’s development from adolescence to young adulthood.

Over the course of the two devastating surges of the pandemic in India, Pooja’s family lost everything—home and employment—displacing the family back to their rural village of origin twice. Equipped with self-confidence and her scholarship funds, Pooja advocated for her right to remain in Bangalore and pursue her Nursing degree. As part of her Shadhika Scholarship, she received a Technology Package (including a laptop, computer classes, and connectivity costs) to access to remote education, and Shadhika’s Emergency COVID Fund has been providing basic sustenance to her family, effectively preventing Pooja’s forced marriage. 

Shadhika exists to create a culture shift by ensuring that every young woman in India is empowered to realize her full potential. Since COVID began, Shadhika’s team and partners are working in overdrive to continue their gender-equity seeking work so young women like Pooja can maintain a chance at pursuing their life goals during and post-pandemic.


GROUNDSWELL OF CHANGE 


Shadhika provides financial support throughout the full continuum of a young woman’s life in the form of leadership development, self-advocacy skills, and academic tutoring for pre-teen and teenage girls and post-secondary scholarships and job readiness opportunities for young women.

Shadhika’s scaling model is based on 1) the innovation of grassroots leadership to address local the root causes of gender inequity in the most marginalized castes, including Dalit families, religious minorities, rural communities, and families of sex workers; and 2) the individual girl being a powerful agent of replication, modeling change in her family and her community.

This model enables each young woman to stave off threats throughout the most vulnerable stages of her development in order to get a job in the formal economy. In doing so, she is able to earn 2-3 times the average income in India in their first year of employment. These young women effectively become the principal breadwinner and thereby control critical aspects of their lives like family planning and career choices. Each young woman supported by Shadhika will empower 112 others on average; a ripple effect that will create a groundswell of change.

IMPACT

In 2019, Shadhika served over 3,500 young women in India. Thanks to Shadhika’s wraparound support:

 - 82% of the young women escaped early, forced marriage 
 - 100% completed secondary school
 - 89% of Shadhika Scholars graduated from college
 - 77% received a job or internship upon graduation 

BUDGET

Shadhika aims to raise $50,000 through the Girl Alliance Opportunity Fund to work with 2 new partners and offer 5-10 full college scholarships in 2022:

  - With $20,000 per year, Shadhika’s local partners run girl-centered afterschool programs that promote leadership development, self-advocacy, and academic tutoring for teenage girls.
 - With $10,000 per year, Shadhika will give up to 5-10 full scholarships that will pay for room and board, college tuition, school supplies, a living stipend, and a comprehensive Technology Package.

No gift is too small:

 - $100 covers the costs for 1 year of girl-centered human rights training.
 - $500 provides a young woman with a laptop to access remote learning.
 - $1,500 sends a girl to college for 1 year.

Post-COVID, the threats to a young woman’s life goals have multiplied and intensified. All indicators of gender inequality and gender-based violence--like rates of forced marriage, sex trafficking, and girl school dropout--have increased in a phenomenon the UN calls the “shadow pandemic.”

With these new funds, Shadhika will give the young women of India the tools to advocate for their own rights in the aftermath of the pandemic and the organization will be one step closer to its moonshot goal to serve 10,000 young women annually by 2030.

This project is supported by the Girls Opportunity Alliance .

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